11 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
(1987), edited by David Lehman, featuring work by X. J. Kennedy, Dana Gioia,
and Marilyn Hacker, poets most often associated with neoformalism.
Another division in contemporary poetry, suggested by poet and trans-
lator Paul Auster, is between poets influenced by the British Romantic
tradition beginning with William Wordsworth and those influenced by more-
experimental French traditions beginning with Stéphane Mallarmé and Charles
Baudelaire. Among American Modernist poets, Robert Frost was most clearly
in the British tradition with his emphasis on describing the natural world, on
plain speech in poetry, and on accessibility to a more general audience. T. S.
Eliot, on the other hand, was clearly influenced by French traditions, an influ-
ence that can be seen in the fragmentation of his poetry, his emphasis on urban
themes, and his tendency to have poems written in many voices. Drawing on
a description by the French poet Yves Bonnefoy of “English as a ‘mirror’ and
French as a ‘sphere,’ the one Aristotelian in its acceptance of the given, the
other Platonic in its readiness to hypothesize ‘a different reality, a different
realm,’” Auster posits a distinction related not merely to style but to sensibility.
Swenson and St. John later use the words “immanent” and “transcendent” to
describe the difference between these two groups, the first referring to poets
who attempt to reflect the world, the second whose works seek to shape and
transform it.
An additional debate that follows, in part, from the distinctions noted
above concerns the issue of “accessibility” in poetry. Critics (and poets) who
champion “accessibility” in poetry prefer poems that do not place excessive
demands on the reader to look up unfamiliar words or to gloss unfamiliar
allusions, references to previous literature or history. The call for accessibility
stems, in part, from a continuing reaction against the unusual difficulties pre-
sented in modern poetry. But the call for accessibility is also deployed, legiti-
mately, against poems that seem to have significance only to the author who
wrote the poem, without an apparent concern for a larger audience.
Admirers of Billy Collins have praised his work for qualities associated
with accessibility. His poems feature the quotidian, ordinary, even trivial, as is
evident in just a sampling of titles from his oeuvre: “A Portrait of the Reader
with a Bowl of Cereal,” “Splitting Wood,” and “I Chop Some Parsley While
Listening to Art Blakey’s Version of ‘Three Blind Mice.’” Beyond Collins’s aim
for accessibility in his own poetry, he has used his influence as U.S. poet laure-
ate from 2001 to 2003, among other positions he has held, to make poetry less
a mystery and more an everyday pleasure for the public. In 2003 he published
the anthology Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry; its 180 poems provide one
for each day of the high-school year. Its success was followed in 2005 with 180
More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day. The poems can be freely accessed
online, one per day, at http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/165.html. Another
poet laureate, Robert Pinsky, started the Favorite Poem Project (http://www.
favoritepoem.org/), in which Americans of all ages read and discuss their
favorite poems.